


river water, break my home and carry me to sea

by wanderNavi



Series: tiny ships in the shadow of the behemoth [6]
Category: Fire Emblem: Kakusei | Fire Emblem: Awakening
Genre: Aftermath of character death, Gen, apparently i will never stop writing about grief!
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-17
Updated: 2020-10-17
Packaged: 2021-03-08 22:48:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,672
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27054448
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wanderNavi/pseuds/wanderNavi
Summary: After Grima, Frederick avoids his apartment.
Relationships: Chrom & Frederick (Fire Emblem), Frederick/My Unit | Reflet | Robin
Series: tiny ships in the shadow of the behemoth [6]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1236185
Kudos: 14





	river water, break my home and carry me to sea

**Author's Note:**

> Good god, who knows when I’ll write Behemoth. I still have so much research I need to do for it.

“Cynthia and Nah want me to travel with them,” Morgan tells Frederick. “I don’t know how long I’ll be gone.”

“Where will you be going?” Frederick asks after he sets his fork and knife back down by his plate at precise, clean angles.

His son’s hands fidget slightly over his own utensils. He admits without quite meeting Frederick’s eyes, “They want to travel along Ferox’s southern border first. Then I think they’re taking a ship from Port Ferox to visit the western continent.”

A trip in the scale of months, if not years, then. When Morgan comes back, the leaves will have changed several times and the castle’s garden beds shifted through seasonal arrangement even more so. The renovations repairing the holes knocked into various places around the castle will be completely done by then. There will be new pegasi to train.

If he even comes back. If the ships crossing the oceans aren’t sunk by storms. If he isn’t pressed into a fight somewhere and takes an injury magic can’t heal in time. If he doesn’t decide to keep pressing forward into the world as far away as he can get from the apartment’s gravestone heavy silence.

“If you want to go, you can go,” Frederick says. “Remember that you’ll still be representing Ylisse and the Shepherds on your journey, and your actions will reflect on us all.”

“I know. I’ll write,” promises Morgan.

“When will you leave?”

“Maybe next week? The girls still need to gather some supplies.” Morgan lifts another forkful of noodles to his mouth and eats. Frederick sips from his rapidly cooling cup of tea. True, the three will need feed for their horses and funds for buying food on the road. The castle’s medical wing isn’t done refilling supplies yet, adding to the wait.

Morgan reaches towards the center of the table for the tea pot, refilling Frederick’s cup. As he pours, he says with worry plain in his eyes, “I don’t have to go.”

“No, go. See the world outside of the army,” Frederick says firmly. “You should go, Morgan.”

“Will you be alright by yourself here?”

* * *

The three leave before dawn, early enough so that Frederick has a bare sliver of time to see his son off. In the dim light, he can’t see if Morgan looks back as the horses trot away. Frederick watches for as long as he can. For only a few moments, his duties stand still, held back.

He turns away and heads directly back into the castle proper. The day passes with training new recruits, arguing over pensions, arguing even more with goldsmiths, and attending the postponed meeting with their trade advisor. His duties carry him through a brilliant blue noon, the orange-gold sunset, and past dinner and the last legs of the candle on his desk besides the ink pot.

Cordelia intercepts him as he’s retrieving a new stick. Lightly frowning, she asks, “Frederick, why are you still here? It’s late and you’ve been here since dawn.”

“I just have a few reports to finish commenting on and signing off,” he assures her.

“The land distribution projects?” she guesses. “Even if you finish them now, no one’s going to be able to move forward until the Slieve coalition finish roadblocking the southwestern delegations. That will take us weeks.” She gentles. “You should go rest. We’ll all need our wits about us.”

“I’ll take that under advisement,” Frederick stiffly says.

* * *

It takes Chrom a couple days longer than he used to in noticing that Frederick basically lives from his office. He crashes in during the mid-afternoon lull when Frederick doesn’t have any appointments to conveniently duck into.

With a head already full of anger, the Exalt barks out, “Frederick, go the hell home already.”

“Milord,” frigidly replies Frederick.

“Go home and don’t come back until you’ve eaten an actual meal and slept for ten hours,” Chrom barrels on. The ever-present tension across his shoulders hiss like a bonfire.

“We still have the _extremely pressing_ negotiations with the Lingxi Federation,” Frederick says. “I have _work_ I must do.”

“Go home, that’s an _order_ , Sir Frederick,” Chrom almost snarls.

Frederick clenches his teeth and had Chrom been anyone except his liege, Frederick would rip right back at him for the unfairness of this continued feud. No one had time for these endless arguments of _you-should-have_ and _no-you’re-wrong_. What had been done was done, and for the better of all generations to come.

“Very well,” Frederick grinds out and mentally arranges for someone to bring the less confidential work materials to his apartment later when Chrom isn’t looming in his office anymore.

And so, for the first time in a couple weeks, Frederick sees his apartment while sunlight still passes through the closed windows.

“I’m home,” he says to the stale dust.

 _Welcome home_ , whispers back the books he still haven’t cleared away. The apron hanging on the right in the kitchen is too small for him. With winter’s fast approach, the wardrobes need packing and switching. The chests he already own won’t be enough for the extra clothing they’ll hold this year. And to be frank, he’s never going to get through the stacks of smooth, cream-white parchment tucked into the corner of the living room besides all the tactical and strategy books carefully ordered by subject and author on the bookcase.

He sits down heavily in a chair outside the sun’s path and puts his head in his hands.

* * *

Frederick returns to his office the next day, having technically met Chrom’s requirements; it’s not like he can check if Frederick lies anyways. But regardless, Chrom chases him out again when weekend arrives and between the choices of self-flagellation via socializing with either Vaike or Virion or cleaning his apartment, Frederick picks the ghosts.

He brings a fresh apple pie from the castle kitchen, still warm, and sets it on the living room’s central table. Cracking open the windows takes a concerning amount of effort. He resolves to investigate after checking on the planters hanging outside. Unsurprisingly, there are weeds.

Is Frederick supposed to bring the flowers inside for the frost? He can’t remember; he’d never been the one to care for them. Morgan might know, but by the time Frederick’s letter finds him and a reply snakes its way back, it’ll be far too late. Before – _before_ – he’d paid a criminally insufficient amount of attention to the flowers arranged in vases inside: clippings of soft pink peonies, a tumble of curling morning glories, stiff-necked roses, freckled lilies, dense chrysanthemums in all their colors except white, and the thin lines of veins on green and purple leaves which deft fingers traced along their edges. She’d considered growing foxgloves but gave up when the neighborhood cats took too keen a liking to napping on the warm mulch. Once, in the dark heat of a summer night, she decided, “When we have a child, I want to grow a lemon tree.”

He’d considered the apartment’s square foot size and the furniture they could shuffle around and said back, “I don’t think we have enough room.”

“If we have a child, that will mean our fighting is over. We could afford a house then, there’ll be space,” she explained.

Frederick leaves the flowers outside.

He dusts, he takes the too small apron off its hook, he sweeps the hardwood. He washes his hands and eats a slice of the cooled apple pie. Among the recipe books, he finds slivers of her notes used as bookmarks for dishes she wanted to try in the seemingly unending quest to see what cuisine she couldn’t handle, which always seemed to be “none of them.” Behind one of the couches, against the wall, he unearths a thin novel they both forgot about.

Leaving aside the matter of buying a new chest, Frederick goes through the messy affair of piling a mountain of clothing on his bed and taking thin shirts and light vests off hangers. He unfolds sweaters and shakes mothballs out of scarves and slips pairs of gloves into a drawer. He brushes a hand over thick fur and wool coats, checking the seams and the buttons, and slips them into protective dust covers before hanging them up. Ice boots replace the boxed away summer slippers. The mountain on the bed subsides into a hill.

By the time he finishes handling all his clothing, the sun will set in a couple hours. He places one hand on the shoulder-seam of an indigo dress and decides: _no_. Not now.

Frederick makes dinner out of a pair of eggs cracked over some leftovers and stir-fried again on the stove.

* * *

Morgan’s first letter arrives as the leaves begin falling in earnest. The traveling trio made it safely to Ferox’s arenas, where he and Cynthia were immediately distracted by offers to train with the champion hopefuls. He sheepishly admits to overruling Nah’s urgings that they continue their travelling and now she’s been filling their days with _I-told-you-so_ as the snows come in. The three are boarding the horses with their Feroxian hosts and joining a dogsled expedition heading towards Port Ferox.

Someone named Eugene introduces him to the concept of skis. “Mother would like these,” he writes. “Maybe we can adapt the concept for desert sand.”

Frederick packs a bottle of wine, some bread, several slices of cheese and slow-roasted ham, and two glasses into a basket. The letter he slips into a jacket pocket. Gloves on, he makes his way to the soldier’s cemetery.

At the gates, he waits while a family of four – a father or uncle and three children – exit in somber silence before ducking in. Despite the season, the grass remains a curated, uniform green. Three sections in and down the sixteenth row, Frederick stands before an empty grave.

“We should ask the hierophant when my birthday is,” she joked grimly. “It’s only fair that they stole all my memories. Then we can—”

She laughed, once and hard.

Of course they never asked.

Frederick sets the basket down in front of the gravestone with no family name nor date of birth and lowers himself down after it. He pulls the creased letter out of his pocket and unfolds it.

“Morgan wrote,” he tells the gravestone. “Here: ‘Dear Father…’”

The wind pulls at the folds of his clothing and at his hair as he reads and sips a single glass of wine. After he eats his share of the food, he tidies the flowers growing on her plot and when the cemetery finally empties out as much as it can, he admits with a dense hurt that sits low in his chest, “We need you Robin.”

* * *

After four hours of sour negotiations, everyone gladly calls for a break for the rest of the day. Due to a trick from how the clouds are composed, the sunset casts a deep yellow-orange hue across the whole sky and everything the light touches, like the tinted gradients of a lucid dream. Chrom catches Frederick standing under the bare branches of a skeletal tree.

“Frederick, I wanted to talk to you about something,” Chrom calls out.

“Yes, milord?” Frederick answers.

Chrom shoves his hands into his pockets under the thick folds of his gold and green embroidered winter cloak. He says, “Do you remember when we went to Mount Prism and what Naga said about –” he swallows “—about Robin sacrificing herself?”

“It would conclusively eliminate Grima for good, yes,” says Frederick.

“Not that part. The part where Robin could still … could still come back.”

More apprehensive this time, Frederick slowly replies, “Yes, I do remember.”

It hadn’t seemed worthwhile thinking about. Even Robin dismissed the possibility after a half-hour’s deliberations; what died should stay dead. Only application of dark magic on the scale of what Grima used for the Risen could animate the dead and those beasts hadn’t been capable of complicated thought beyond fighting. No human could surmount death’s walled borders.

Maintaining steely eye contact in the purpling light, Chrom declares, “I’m going looking for her.”

“ _Excuse me?_ ”

“Who’s to say where she’ll appear. What if she needs help getting back home?” Chrom keeps challenging. “She must be out there somewhere. She just needs to come home.”

Frederick scrapes together his strained senses. “Milord, what are you even suggesting? She’s _dead_.”

“You heard Naga,” Chrom stubbornly says. “Do you not trust a god?”

“Naga said there’s a _small_ chance Robin could resurrect. You’d divert our limited resources on a small chance? We don’t even know how small she means,” says Frederick incredulously. “Milord, all personnel is tied up with the land negotiations and the trade delegations. We don’t have anyone we can spare.”

“Didn’t you hear me? I said, _I’m_ going myself. I trust everyone can deal with those matters without my constant presence. There’s already barely anything I can do or say at this point anyways without instantly alienating any party and having them in arms,” his Exalt lays out.

Frederick counters, “And when you go traveling, who’s guarding you and attending to you? You’re not traveling alone. As I said, there’s no personnel we can afford.”

“I won’t need that many guards. I can fend for myself. And there are allies outside of Ylisse who fought with the Shepherds I can call on for assistance,” Chrom says, visibly growing frustrated.

“No,” Frederick says. Shadows from the castle walls and the darkening sky fall upon them. “If you’re going anywhere, at the very least I insist I accompany you. But at our current junction, we cannot spare _either_ of us. What will it look like and what will it say if the Exalt saunters off on a jaunt of his own in the middle of critical negotiations?”

“So I just sit there, unable to say anything while everyone else haggles over minutia and slip in as many loopholes they can get away with under the table?” Neither of them pay attention as a servant edges past to light the garden’s torches. Chrom’s tirade continues, “Do you know who could have wrapped up all of this arguing in half the time we tried so far?”

“ _Don’t you dare_ ,” Frederick hisses, losing control of his strained respect.

Chrom’s eyes flash volcanic at the interruption and he hurls down, “ _Robin_ , but she _lied_ to me and now she’s _dead_.”

Frederick breathes in sharp through his nose and acidly says, “I believe, milord, that we should both call it an evening and depart.”

If he wants to, Chrom can keep them in the cold dusk for as long as he likes, but he spits out, “ _Fine_ ,” and whirls away.

* * *

Sumia smiles apologetically as she explains, “We’ve put it off for long enough, but someone needs to empty out Robin’s office. I thought you’d rather do it yourself instead of having the servants do it.”

“I would, thank you,” Frederick says. But he looks almost helplessly at the stacks and stacks of paper on his desk; it isn’t even an excuse this time, he’s genuinely been too busy to do more than collapse into bed late each night when he finally drags himself to his apartment.

“I can hold off the servants for a few more weeks,” Sumia assures.

He sighs in relief. “Thank you. I’ll take care of it before the end of the month.”

Nodding, she ducks back out of the doorway.

The fact that Robin’s office sat untouched for almost a year hits him like a punch. Had it only been so long?

When Frederick finally drags himself over to her old office, collapsed boxes under one arm and duster gripped in the other hand, a cloth hanging around his neck in case there’s a whole year’s worth of dust laying on everything, he finds the place already mostly packed away. _That’s right_ , he realizes mutely. Robin would have put away all the loose papers and pens before they set off for Valm. There was no telling how long the campaign would last. So the books had a felt cloth draped over their spines, the drawers were locked shut, the chair pushed in with perfectly symmetric space at both sides from the desk. The waste bin sits empty.

He sets down the supplies he brought and takes out the ring of keys he hopes has what he needs. After testing out six of the eight and stuck between starting to worry he grabbed the wrong set and wondering what on earth Robin used the spent six keys on, the seventh key unlocks her cabinets with a click. The drawer opens on smooth wheels and reveals a tall stack of folders and binders. Carefully pulling them out, Frederick flicks through their contents: old contract receipts and sketches of hypothetical maps and notes from the harrowing series of meetings repairing the tattered Pegasus Knights.

He runs his thumb over the scratches of her pen, where the pressure of her hand dented the paper on both sides. With a jolt, he suddenly recognizes the origin of her boxy handwriting that marched in neat rows down the page. Whoever taught her how to write learned from the strain of Ferox influenced by Chon’sin. It’s in her y’s and the loop of her a’s. Frederick never encountered their script until he helped Robin craft her ciphers in the second half of their Valmese campaign and Flavia lent her material to work off of.

Into one box, he arranges the contents of the desk, all its papers and its crinkled pictures. He swaddles her quills and pens with fabric before tucking them in a gap between a stack of folders and the wall of the box. In another box, he pulls down the books from the office shelves, comparing the titles to the tomes he left untouched in his apartment. He sets aside the occasional duplicate book without any notes in its margins for donating to the castle’s library.

The day drags as he packs away the facets of Robin’s work.

He considers trashing the cracked cup on her desk, that they chipped one evening when Frederick was in her office, the two of them working together on something he can’t remember for the Shepherds. They’d carried their dinners into her office and worked through the evening when she said something that sent Frederick laughing. That in turn set her off until a careless hand swiped a cup off the desk. She shrieked in surprise as she tried catching it and he could barely contain his laughter to help her.

Pulling over one of the cloths used for the books, he wraps the cup securely and puts it into a box.

Each box weighs heavy in his arms as he carries them through the castle’s hallways and stairs until he finally reaches a relatively unused side entrance where he places each load into a cart he borrowed. The process takes him almost an hour and as Frederick’s picking up the penultimate box, Chrom appears in the doorway with an unreadable expression on his face.

Frederick leans against the table, suddenly exhausted in a way that has nothing to do with the burden of how _light_ his wife’s life work ultimately amounts to. She should have had more than a few years to shine with all her supernova brilliance.

Chrom’s eyes rove over the bare walls and empty shelves and the cleared off desk surface. He sighs and offers with a tired tilt in his spine, “Let me help you with that.”

Silently, he takes the last box at Frederick’s nod. Without a single word passed between them, they load the last of Robin into the cart and drive it to Frederick’s apartment, where they stack her belongings in the corner of the unused bedroom.

* * *

Chrom hands Frederick Morgan’s next letter himself.

“Thank you, milord,” Frederick says with a raised eyebrow as he accepts the thick packet. It feels like Morgan stuffed a whole playscript in there by its weight and thickness. The boy’s taken to Chon’sin poetry with fervor.

“You’re welcome. Cynthia’s also been writing,” Chrom tells him by way of explanation. He waits for Frederick to tuck away the envelope before saying, “I’m still going to look for Robin.”

Frederick stares in level silence. Chrom waits him out until he finally breaks and asks, “Why?”

“I have to believe in the chance,” Chrom answers with a half-shrug. “All my life I’ve accepted death. You’ve been there at every step. But this time, even if there’s only a hair’s chance, I don’t think I can accept death.”

He shakes his head as he sighs and looks away. “I understand,” he says lowly, “ _why_ she…”

“But it hurts,” Frederick fills in. Yes, he’d been there for Exalt Phillip and the late queen and Emmeryn and all their fallen soldiers and citizens.

“Worse, I was betrayed,” Chrom says. “In front of everyone, she promised she wouldn’t use herself as the ultimate strike but then on Grima rather than let me deal the blow with the awakened Falchion, she sacrificed herself. And both of you knew she would.”

“What would be the point of defeating Grima now but leaving him able to resurrect once again a thousand years in the future when Naga’s too spent to bring any opposition against him? It’ll only sentence our descendants to destruction,” Frederick says and Chrom grudgingly allows the point to hit.

Dragging the conversation back on track, Chrom says, “Well, regardless of my reason, I’m searching for her. After we wrap all of these messes up long enough that they won’t fall apart if someone breathes wrong and when the weather’s less dreadful, I’m starting.”

 _He’s young_ , Frederick startles himself into thinking. They all are; the wars killed off too much of their parents’ generations. How young was Robin when they married, when she died? Will they ever know?

He sets the questions aside and says with a deep breath that feels like finally breaking through a restrictive band squeezing his lungs and heart hard and tight, “Then allow me to accompany you milord.”

**Author's Note:**

> You know, Chrom’s about 21 when this fic takes place.


End file.
